“Let me get this straight, you don’t know what happened?” I was incredulous. Zach had told me a tale where he’d wandered outside and found Drea dead inside.
“I’d taken enough shit to kill an elephant.” Zach said, mighty defensive, pupils shrinking to pinpricks.
“What about Drea?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah what?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“What did she take?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Because now it matters; now it’s important. “Fuck’s sake, Zach, tell me.”
“K.” He lowered his eyes. “Other stuff too. She liked White Russian.”
Cocaine. “Enough to kill her?”
“No, no,” Zach said. “She knew what she was doing. We both did.”
To me, taking drugs was like roulette. How did any addict know what was safe and wasn’t?
“And then you wandered outside?”
“To take a piss, yes.”
“But you don’t remember how long you were gone for?”
“I already told you.” Agitated all over again, in between smokes, he smacked his palms on his thigh, as if he were playing bongos. “It was dark. The place was a death trap. I had to find my way out and then back in.”
Search me why he didn’t drop his fly in the next door room. Wouldn’t someone off his face on crack, or whatever Zach was on at the time, take the simplest course of action?
I adopted my best humouring tone. “Right, so then you came back.”
He stood up. Dark patches of sweat stained his T-shirt. Every part of him shook. His eyes were wild. Had he dropped acid in front of me and I’d been too spun out to notice?
“Sit down.”
“Molly, if I tell you what happened, my life is over. Please, I’m begging you. I could go to prison.” His pleading expression turned me inside out.
“Zach, you’re already there.” In a prison of your own making, with walls constructed of lies.
Slumping down, he put his face in his hands. I reached across and gently touched his arm. “You said it was an accident.”
“She fell,” he sobbed.
“Fell? Where?”
I prised his fingers apart. He stared at me with dull eyes. Snot trickled out of one nostril. “I swear I didn’t know about it.”
“Didn’t know what, Zach?”
“About the well.”
I stared at him for what felt a full minute. God.
“It had been partially filled in but the boards above were rotten.” He gaped at me, praying I could fill in the gaps so that he wouldn’t have to relive that night, except I think he’d done nothing else but relive that night ever since.
“So Drea fell through the floor?” Dad’s words echoed through my head: the pathologist found the presence of diatoms, or micro-algae in her bone marrow. The only way these could enter would be via the respiratory system.
He nodded crazily. “I came back in. Couldn’t find her. It was quiet. Too quiet. Like a snowflake drifting through space,” he said, madly extemporising. “Then I saw. Oh fuck.” He wrung his hands.
“How did you see? Wasn’t it dark?”
“We had torches.”
“Then what?” I nodded for him to continue.
“I inched over. Didn’t want to get too close, and—” He let out a slow moan.
“Come on, Zach,” I urged him. “Tell me.”
“I saw blood. There was blood,” he repeated, agonised.
“She hadn’t gone to the bottom, right?”
“It was worse. She’d got wedged somehow.”
I briefly closed my eyes, tried to visualise. Bloody hell. “Upside down?”
“No, no. She plunged straight through backwards and then got stuck below the water line.” Zach’s shoulders heaved up and down in despair. It sounded plausible. It did. But;
“If the stupid owner hadn’t tried to block it up, she would have stood a chance.”
“The blood, where did you say it was?” Cranial injuries, Rocco had written.
“What do you mean?”
“Was it on her or—”
“Christ, Molly, on her head, on the wall, on the beam. Jesus, Molly, I don’t know. Head, face, building what does it matter?”
It mattered. It made the difference. Bile filled my mouth. “Are you sure you’re telling me the truth?”
“I am. I swear I did not hurt her.”
I locked eyes with his. Would Zach even know? “It was only the two of you? Nobody else?”
“Yeah. Course.”
“Okay, then what?”
“I panicked. I mean I really lost it.”
“And?”
“I got the fuck out of there.”
“Was she dead?”
His face contorted in anguish. “I don’t know,” he whined, obviously haunted by the possibility that she wasn’t. “I couldn’t tell. I had no phone, so I went to get help.”
“Good,” I said weakly. I wanted to find something in this that would redeem my brother in my eyes, but I was running on empty, running on fumes. “Then what?”
His eyes darted to the door. “There’s a phone box down the road. I reversed the charges.” His shoulders rounded, eyes looking everywhere but at me. A terrible thought broke loose, and fear marched straight at me, grabbed hold of my throat with its greedy fingers, and would not let go. Oh God, couldn’t be, but if it did, everything made sense. And Scarlet, poor Scarlet, had paid for them all.
“You phoned Dad, didn’t you?”
Zach looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said, “so sorry.”